The date is December 18. The year 2015. And Verb Days is back in the house!

We’re live from Verb Days 4.0, the fourth edition of our annual hackathon. Five teams brimming with coding badassery and creative prowess are about to duke it out in the open space area of our HQ. This year’s mission? Give birth to a brand new and exciting integration with Hubgets, our teamwork app. As part of this year’s contest, we’re not just having fun, we are also making Hubgets a better collaboration tool for every user.

The main evaluation criteria for each project remains unchanged. Innovation will count the most, while each team will have to pick a member who doesn’t fumble with words to give a presentation of their brainchild. If we’re going to offer it publicly, we’ll have to be the first to like it.

Calculating the true size of the Unified Communications & Collaboration (UC&C) market has never been easy as many organizations are still operating a multi-vendor mix of communication and collaboration solutions, and so the data is scattered all over the place. However, there is one key area of UC&C that has shown steady growth over the years, and it’s poised to grow even more in the coming years.

IDC forecasts that UC&C services in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) are set to rise from $7.7 billion in 2012 to $11.7 billion in 2016, but more importantly that the main driver for this growth is mobile UC. Most other think tanks agree that mobility is arguably the fastest-growing component of UC&C. IDC, for its part, has calculated a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 32% per year. However, the mobile UC ecosystem is still a fountain that sits largely untapped

Most small-to-medium businesses (SMB) don’t have legacy UC&C software to grapple with, making them more likely than enterprises to move to pure cloud-based UC&C services, according to data gauged by IDG Enterprise. The ratio is 20% versus 7%, respectively.

In its 2015 Unified Communications & Collaboration Survey, IDG uncovered that 33% of IT leaders plan to increase spending in Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C), both hosted and hybrid – a combination of hosted and on-premise services. Spending will increase by an average of 9% through 2016, while enterprises currently lavish an average of $8.1 million on UC&C products and / or services alone. In 2012, a similar survey uncovered that 49% of respondents still used on-premises solutions. That number has only slightly increased to 51% so far, but things are about to change

Eddington’s Arrow of Time – describing the one-way direction (or asymmetry) of time – says that things in the real world can never be fully reversed. Unlike in the microscopic world, where things tend to behave a little differently, our world is governed by an obvious flow of time.

A drop of ink can instantly spoil an entire glass of water. Reversing the process would take far more energy and resources than it took to cause it, not to mention more time. The obvious solution

As we close the books on 2015, tech industry watchers are opening a new chapter full of exciting predictions for the future. Cloud computing is helping organizations big and small meet their business objectives now more than ever, especially in emerging markets. Additionally, IT shops will have more than half of their operations hosted in the cloud by the end of 2016.

Data from IDG Enterprise indicates that 56% of a company’s IT environment will be hosted in the cloud by the end of next year (up from 44% today). 8% of the 962 IT decision makers interviewed for the study said their entire IT environment was in the cloud. Companies use a mix of public, private and hybrid cloud services, with the private model being mostly preferred by enterprises. Now, here’s what we think sounds particularly interesting, not just for hot shot enterprises but for medium-sized players as well

We’ve been keeping a close eye on one of Elon Musk’s more down-to-earth concepts, the Hyperloop. Our excitement levels reached new heights when we learned that the next-gen transportation system was about to enter its first real-life testing phase in Apex Industrial Park in the City of North Las Vegas, Nevada next year.

This week, Hyperloop Technologies confirmed that the company has entered into an agreement to locate its Propulsion Open Air Test (POAT) on a 50 acre site in the scorching hot location

Sitting on the edge of your seat, shaking with anticipation as theaters everywhere get ready to premiere Star Wars: The Force Awakens next week? So are we. Don’t worry, your symptoms are normal. That’s what Sci-Fi does to a person.

During lunch break the other day, we wanted to settle an argument about the might of Galactic Federation ships versus those of The Empire. No one really knew for sure just how big these things were until we happened upon this amazing infographic by Dirk Loechel. We decided to share it with the rest of the class so everyone can brush up on their general Sci-Fi knowledge as we tick the days on our calendars. You know, just in case any other debates ensue as we sit in line at the cinema.

Photo by Gabriele Motter on Unsplash

Pop quiz! (try and answer before moving to the next paragraph). How long was the Galactic Empire Executor Class Super Star Destroyer?

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If you said 19 kilometers, you certainly know your Star Wars vessels. Flagship of the Dark Lord of the Sith Darth Vader, the mighty “enemy” ship measures a cool 19,000 meters in length. It would take half a day to traverse it by foot.

Here’s an infographic with a visual comparison of all science fiction space-crafts known to man, not just those from the Star Wars saga. Dirk Loechel says he compiled it from works by many other designers in 2013. It doesn’t quite feature everything that the genre has had to offer, but it’s still an invaluable resource for fans of such titles as Event Horizon, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Halo, EVE, as well as all-time classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Warhammer, Alien, and of course, Star Wars.

The graphic is of considerable proportions, so we suggest downloading the image to your hard drive and opening it in a viewer with zooming capabilities. Alternately, you can right-click the image and open it in a separate tab to display it in all its glory and read the specs for every ship. For who’s asking, a single pixel on the full-scale canvas represents 1 meter.

Communication is one of the major challenges to tackle when you’re in the public sector doing business with partners, trying to grow a customer base, etc. Being able to take orders, answer questions, close deals and, most importantly just be there for your partners and clients in a timely manner is essential for growing a reputation as a trusty player in your field. To fulfill today’s growing demands and avoid being crushed by competitors, leaving the past behind is a good way to cement your business and assist your growth plan.

Private branch exchange (PBX) has come a long way since its inception in the early ’90s, when operators had to manage switchboards manually, using cord circuits

The say the future of business is in the cloud. 72% of organizations today have at least one application in the cloud, and spending in this area continues to be on the rise. Cost efficiency, agility and speed to-market are just some of the undeniable advantages that cloud computing services have to offer. But there is another “big” area of interest that’s about to become one of the largest business opportunities of the century.

Big data is the new oil according to Jer Thorp, co-founder of the Office for Creative Research, a multi-disciplinary research group. And according to Foursquare’s Andreq Hogue, for every two degrees that go up, check-ins at ice cream shops also go up by 2%. That’s the power of

A happy customer is a returning customer. Brand loyalty is when your users have the opportunity and good reason to choose another brand, and yet they choose to stick with you. Maybe it’s how your brand looks. Maybe it’s how it sounds, tastes, or feels. Whatever it is, something clicked with them and they clicked with you.

If your product sells today, that’s no guarantee it will sell tomorrow, or a year from now. Unless you’re giving away free cash bundles, holding on to a user base is no walk in the park. Some companies use surveys to see how consumers view their brand and how they stack against their competitors, and they adjust their practices based on the feedback. Others prefer to pour all their resources into building trust, quality and value, without asking too much around. But most don’t bother to do any of these things. And that’s no way to obtain loyalty